keelboatmen stay: St.
Gertrude's, I think. If she's a runaway she may be there."
"I'll check," said January. "But if this girl tried to leave the city another way-on a steamboat, perhaps-how carefully are they looking at people's papers?"
"People like us?" A glint of anger appeared in the boatman's eye. "People of color? Very closely indeed.
People who might not have papers to prove they're truly peo ple in the eyes of the law? A runaway is money out of someone's pocket. And maybe money in someone else's as well."
He sipped his coffee. His dark eyes moved to Dunk, deep in conversation now with stout Mr. Granville of the Bank of Louisiana, and to the men and women standing nearby, chained and dripping in the shelter of the eaves. "There's not much by way of law up there," Jim continued. "I've been taken twice, up in Missouri, with not a sheriff or a lawman who'll even ask if I was or wasn't free in the eyes of the law.
What's the use of having records here in Louisiana that you're a free man, if you're chained on some farm out in the territories? The second man who kidnapped me was the local magistrate. I was a week hiding in the bushes and the streams like an animal, until I reached the river again."
Natchez Jim shook his head. "I don't go up there anymore," he said softly. "Even here where there's law, they don't let many slip past."
No, thought January, looking back at the tall black masts of the steamboats, spewing slow rivers of smoke into the nigrous sky. They don't let many slip past.
From a woman selling bright-colored kerchiefs-and wearing one so brilliant and so elaborately tied as to put all of her stock to shame-he found out the direction of the place he wanted next to seek. "He's still abed, I hear, poor man," she told him. "For shame, those doctors turning him out of their clinic before his cure was done, because now, of course, he's more crooked than ever. You'd think if they'd started they'd have finished, and made him straight, wouldn't you?"
"They'd never have made him straight," said January, startled at this reading of the event.
"Silly! Of course they would," retorted the marketwoman. "Rich people go to them all the time, they must know what they're doing. Here." She stepped over to her neighbor, who was just clearing up the last of her okra, her grapes, and her aubergines from her table. "Philom?ne, have you got something our friend here can take to poor H?lier? And what do you think? This fellow says Dr. Soublet doesn't cure people after all with those machines of his."
"That a fact? But I hear he fixed this lady's clubfoot so she can dance just like a little girl. It was in the newspaper..."
Carrying the basket of vegetables, January made his way down Gallatin Street, an unspeakable waterfront alley leading from the markets whose every rough wooden shack and grimy cottage seemed to house either a taproom or a bordello, though they all smelled like privies. Rain splashed in gutters that brimmed with raw sewage, and glimmered like fire in the dull orange bars of light issuing from shuttered windows and open doors. A dark-haired woman in a dress that had to have been bought from a fever victim-overly fashionable and too new to have been sold from a servant's ragbag-called out to him from a doorway, but he walked on.
Just why he was doing this, he could not have said. He would be late to the Hospital, and with almost no sleep, he had risen earlier than his habit, to walk to Mademoi selle Vitrac's school to see how her girls did and to tell her what he had found. Though he would never have mentioned it to Mademoiselle Vitrac, he still considered it a very real possibility that Cora Chouteau had poisoned Otis Redfern. He had encountered nothing yet that proved she hadn't.
Because of his father, he thought. Because of a halfrecalled dream of hounds baying in the swamp.
Because of the little boy sitting on the gallery, waiting for someone to come who cared for him, who would tell him that he wasn't alone.
Maybe because he knew that Rose Vitrac would be doing what he was doing, did she not have the girls who were her charge. Because she had once been alone and desperate, and Cora had stood by her.
Amid the darkness and the fever-heat and the stinks of death, everyone needed